The present invention relates to wireless digital networks, and more particularly, to the problem of client association management.
Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are becoming ubiquitous. Particularly in locations such as school and businesses, there may be a number of wireless access points (APs) present in an area, each providing basic service sets (BSS) to associated clients (known in the standards as stations, STA).
The challenge in managing the WLAN is to manage client association, providing the “best” association between client (STA) and AP providing a BSS.
There are a bewildering number of mechanisms for assisting with this process. Some infrastructure vendors have client software which enables coordination between APs and clients to negotiate a suitable BSS for association. However, most client devices, particularly older client devices, lack this software support. In such cases, the 802.11 infrastructure, the WLAN, has to infer the information about the client's view of the network, and select the proper candidate BSS to handle the client.
The IEEE 802.11k standard (IEEE Std. 802.11k-2008), incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, has proposed different mechanisms on both the 802.11 client and the 802.11 infrastructure so that they are able to co-operatively establish associations with the best BSSID in the client's vicinity. This is done using the 802.11k Beacon Report Information Element that is sent by the 802.11 client (STA) to the infrastructure (AP) in response to a Beacon Request from the AP. The Beacon Report consists of a list of BSS and their properties that the client is able to sense in its vicinity. This provides a standardized mechanism to enable the 802.11 infrastructure to take into account the client's network view to appropriately serve the client via the best available AP/BSS.
Since this standard is relatively new and the implementation optional, there are only a few client devices and drivers that support sending Beacon Reports. In the absence of this information, the infrastructure has to infer this based on observations of client traffic.
What is needed is a method of synthesizing Beacon Reports and using these synthesized reports to assist with the proper association of clients to APs in a WLAN.